[FEATURE REQ, RFC], improving ergonomic HMI fingerprint cross verification

[Greg Troxel]

  The problem with this sort of thing is translation.  I don't know what
  "Alpha Bravo Charlie Delta Echo Foxtrot" would be in other languages,
  or even if it would be pronounced the same way.  Still, this is an ITU
  standard, so perhaps it would be familiar enough.

The whole point of the ICAO phonetic alphabet (adopted by ITU) is that
it can be pronounced unambiguously by speakers of any language.

See

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NATO_phonetic_alphabet

for a nice description.  So from one viewpoint, that of amateur radio
and aviation, no translation is needed.  Still, it's unfriendly to
speakers of other than western European languages to impose words
which are basically drawn from English/French/Spanish.  But, it is
arguably sensible for cross-language fingerprint checking.

It's not clear to me how hexadecimal is used in countries with
non-latin alphabets.  (Perhaps fingerprints should have been in
octal!)

-- 
        Greg Troxel <gdt at ir.bbn.com>